Welcome to Compliance Hot Spots, our weekly snapshot on white-collar, regulatory and compliance news and trends. Today, we examine the emerging white-collar practice of conducting workplace culture reviews and chronicle Jonathan Kanter's public debut as head of the DOJ's antitrust division.  Thanks for reading, and please get in touch with tips and feedback. Contact me at [email protected] and @AGoudsward on Twitter.

eric holder Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Eric Holder, Covington on Reviewing Corporate Culture

Eric Holder returned to Covington & Burling in 2015 after six years as attorney general in which he sought to advance criminal justice reforms and aggressively enforce federal civil rights laws.

Those priorities are not a traditional focus of major corporate law firms, but in the twilight of his legal career, Holder has helped develop a practice at Covington that he says furthers the same causes he has sought to advance throughout this career.

My colleague Bruce Love and I wrote last week about the emerging trend of white-collar lawyers being called on to conduct workplace culture reviews at large companies and institutions, with an eye toward racial and gender equity. White-collar lawyers have noticed that following the #MeToo movement and mass racial justice protests last year, companies are looking to their outside counsel not just to defend them in litigation, but to assess their culture and help determine whether their work environment poses a threat to the health and reputation of their corporation.